Unashamed Accompanists

"But I've been talking too much about myself," says the baritone to the accompanist. "Let's talk about you. Have you heard any of my new records?" That well-seasoned musical fable has grated on the ears of accompanists for years. Fretting under a cloak of near anonymity, they have traditionally been regarded by the public as the perpetual subordinates of the musical world. Singers and other soloists of course know better, and so last week did the audiences flocking to hear Soprano Victoria de Los Angeles launch a German recital tour. At the piano behind her was one of the most gifted and certainly the most eloquent of present-day accompanists, England's Gerald Moore, who says: "The accompanist who 'follows' but does not anticipate is a dull, pedestrian sort of fellow, without electricity, a fallen arch in the march of time."

Like other fine practitioners of the art, Moore dislikes the very term "accompanist." His role, he thinks, is closer to that of a partner or, as another famous accompanist, France's Tasso Janopoulo, describes it, a "co-interpreter." Certainly Moore's superb performances bear him out. He has a remarkable ability to vary rhythms and colors in order to illuminate the shifting moods of a singer's text. Moreover, he is aware that "there are 20,000 ways of performing one piece." and his volumes and tempi are tailored like a Savile Row suit to the style and capacity of the soloist. Most important, he is a deft reader of what France's Irene Aitoff calls the "state of soul" of his partners--the crosscurrents that may warp a performance from its appointed course.

The Special Soul. Trained for a piano virtuoso's career, Moore originally thought that an accompanist was "a sort of caddie who carried the violinist's fiddle." But when he was 24, he accompanied Tenor John Coates, became fascinated by the challenge of fitting music to text, and soon decided that accompanists "have an infinitely richer life than the soloist." Today he adds: "Even if I had the technique and virtuosity of Horowitz or Rubinstein, I would prefer to do what I am doing."

All good accompanists seem to share Moore's enthusiasm, documented wittily if somewhat defensively in his 1944 book, The Unashamed Accompanist. England's Ivor Newton explains his passion for accompanying as resulting from "a phobia about being alone." Italy's Giorgio Favoretto is less interested in togetherness than in "uniting the arts of poetry and music," while France's Janopoulo confesses to lacking the "special soul and the kind of conviction that passes across the footlights." Whatever its appeal, accompanying has attracted first-rate pianists, among them the U.S.'s Paul Ulanowsky and Franz Rupp, England's Geoffrey Parsons and Martin Isepp, Germany's Hertha Klust and Gerhard Weissenborn, Italy's Antonio Beltrami.

Like a Surgeon. Although an accompanist should be a partner, he is also, says Ulanowsky, likely to function as "part policeman and part nursemaid." (But, adds Soprano Erika Koth cryptically: "An accompanist is no lover.") Even as incendiary a singer as Maria Callas scrupulously follows the advice of her pianist, Italy's Antonio Tonini, in questions of interpretation. "Tonini pleases me," says she, "because he is an implacable torturer who makes me repeat the same phrase 20 or more times. He has always been for me like an expert surgeon who digs around in one's innards until the cause of the trouble is found and corrected."

In a showdown between partners, the bigger name usually wins. Moore recalls that when he played for Chaliapin, the great Russian bass used to ham up the end of Schumann's Die beiden Grenadiere with a great theatrical gesture, causing the pianist's Nachspiel to be lost in the applause. "There was nothing I could do," says Moore. "Chaliapin was a great big chap more than six feet tall."

England's Harold Craxton, on the other hand, recalls triumphing over a singer who insisted on going up to a top C at the end of the familiar folk song Christ Child Lullaby. When the singer asked Craxton why he was looking at her "so curiously," he replied: "I was just thinking of the Infant Jesus lying in his mother's arms, and I saw him looking up at her and saying: 'Mother, you've been studying the top C, haven't you?' "

Heard But Not Noticed. The U.S., many critics feel, is now producing the best accompanists in the world. "Pianists here are getting better and better," says Rupp. "I'm sure we all play better than Liszt." Nevertheless, most of the accompanists agree that their art is still low-rated in the U.S., while the situation is changing in Europe. English programs often avoid the word "accompanist" entirely, substituting the more palatable word "piano." In Paris the old program phrase "accompanied by" is replaced by the phrase "with the collaboration of."

But even these status signs are not likely to turn the accompanist into a box-office draw. Like it or not, admits Accompanist Craxton, "The greatest moment of an accompanist must always be when the soloist turns to him and says: 'You were wonderful tonight. I didn't know you were there.' "

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